Richard Pinckney, like most people, had the defects of his qualities, but he was different from others in this: his temper was quick and blazing when roused, yet on rare occasions it could hold its heat and smoulder, and keep alive indefinitely.

When in this condition he shewed nothing of his feelings except towards the person against whom he was in wrath.

Towards them he exhibited the two main characteristics of the North Pole—Distance and Ice.

Phyl felt the frost almost immediately. He talked to her just the same as of old but his pleasantness and laughter were gone and he never sought her eye. She knew at once that it was the business with Silas that had caused this change, and she would have been entirely miserable but for the knowledge of two great facts: she was innocent of any disloyalty to him, he had broken off his engagement to Frances Rhett. Instinct told her that he cared for her, Miss Pinckney had told her the same thing.

Yet day after day passed without bringing the slightest change in Richard Pinckney.

That gentleman after many debates with himself had arrived at the determination against will, against reason, against Love, and against nature to have nothing more to do with Phyl.

Old Pepper Pinckney, that volcano of the past had suffered a fancied insult from his wife; no one knew of it, no one suspected it till on his death his will disclosed it by the fact that he had left the lady—one dollar. The will being unwitnessed—that was the sort of man he was—did not hold; all the same, it held an unsuspected part of his character up for public inspection.

Richard, incapable of such an act, still had Pepper Pinckney for an ancestor. Ancestors leave us more than their pictures.

Having come to this momentous decision, he arrived at another.

One morning at breakfast he announced his intention of going to New York on business, he would start on the morrow and be gone a month. The Beauregards had always been bothering him to go on a visit and he might as well kill two birds with one stone.

Miss Pinckney made little resistance to the idea. She had noticed the coolness between the young people; knowing how much they cared one for the other she had little fear as to the end of the matter and she fancied a change might do good.

But to Phyl it seemed that the end of the world had come.

All that day she scarcely spoke except to Miss Pinckney. She was like a person stunned by some calamity.

Richard Pinckney, notwithstanding the fact that he was to leave for New York on the morrow, did not return to dinner that night. Phyl went upstairs early but she did not go to her room, she went to Juliet’s. Sorrow attracts sorrow. Juliet had always seemed more than a friend, more than a sister, even.

There were times when the ungraspable idea came before her that Juliet was herself. The vision of the Civil War sometimes came back to her and always with the hint, like a half veiled threat, that Richard the man she loved was Rupert the man she had loved, that following the dark law of duplication that works alike for types and events, forms and ideas, her history was to repeat the history of Juliet.

She had saved Richard from death at the hands of Silas Grangerson, her love for him had met Fate face to face and won, but Fate has many reserve weapons. She is an old warrior, and the conqueror of cities and kings does not turn from her purpose because of a momentary defeat.

Phyl shut the door of the room, put the lamp she was carrying on a table and opened the long windows giving upon the piazza. The night was absolutely still, not a breath of wind stirred the foliage of the garden and the faint sounds of the city rose through the warm night. The waning moon would not rise yet for an hour and the stars had the sky to themselves.

She turned from the window and going to the little bureau by the door opened the secret drawer and took out the packet of letters. Then drawing an armchair close to the table and the lamp she sat down, undid the ribbon and began to read the letters.

She felt just as though Juliet were talking to her, telling her of her troubles. She read on placing each letter on the table in turn, one upon the other.

The chimes of St. Michael’s came through the open window but they were unheeded.

When she had read through all the letters she picked out one. The one containing the passionate declaration of Juliet’s love.

She re-read it and then placed it on the table on top of the others.

If she could speak of Richard like that!

But she could do nothing and say nothing. It is one of the curses of womanhood that a woman may not say to a man “I love you,” that the initiative is taken out of her hands.

Phyl was a creature of impulse and it was now for the first time in her life that she recognised this fatal barrier on the woman’s side. With the recognition came the impulse to over jump it.

He cared for her, she knew, or had cared for her. She felt that it only required a movement on her side, a touch, a word to destroy the ice that had formed between them. If he were to go away he might never return, nay, he would never return, of that she felt sure.

And he would go away unless she spoke. She must speak, not to-morrow in the cold light of day when things were impossible, but now, at once, she would say to him simply the truth, “I love you.” If he were to turn away or repulse her it would kill her. No matter, life was absolutely nothing.

She rose from her chair and was just on the point of turning to the door when something checked her.

It was the clock of St. Michael’s striking one.

One o’clock. The whole household would be in bed. He would have retired to his room long ago—and to-morrow it would be too late.

She could never say that to him to-morrow; even now the impulse was dying away, the strength that would have broken convention and disregarded all things was fading in her. She had been dreaming whilst she ought to have been doing, and the hour had passed and would never return.

She sat down again in the chair.

The moon in the cloudless sky outside cast a patch of silver on the floor, then it shewed a silver rim gradually increasing against the sky as it pushed its way through the night to peep in at Phyl. Leaning back in the chair limp and exhausted, with closed eyes, one might have fancied her dead or in a trance and the moon as if to make sure pushed on, framing itself now fully in the window space.

The clock of St. Michael’s struck two, then it chimed the quarter after and almost on the chime Phyl sat up. It was as though she had suddenly come to a resolve. She clasped her hands together for a moment, then she rose, gathered up the letters and put them away, all except one which she held in her hand as though to give her courage for what she was about to do. She carefully extinguished the lamp and then led by the moonlight came out on to the piazza.

Charleston was asleep under the moon; the air was filled with the scent of night jessamine and the faint fragrance of foliage, and scarcely a sound came from all the sleeping city beyond the garden walls and the sea beyond the city.

As she stood with one hand on the piazza rail, suddenly, far away but shrill, came the crowing of a cock.

She shivered as though the sound were a menace, then rigidly gliding like a ghost escaped from the grave and warned by the cockcrow that the hour of return was near, she came along the piazza, mounted the stair to the next floor and came along the upper piazza to the window of Richard Pinckney’s bedroom.

The window was open and, pushing the curtains aside, she went in.